Leading Telecom Develops New Applications with MariaDB's Enterprise Open Source DBMS

The Challenge

América Móvil is the leading provider of mobile telecommunications services in Latin America, serving 279 million wireless subscribers across 25 countries. In 2016 the company began developing the Claro drive service to allow its customers to store and share photos, videos, music, documents and more in a secure cloud environment. After comparing various proprietary and open source DBMSs, América Móvil chose to build the Claro drive apps on MariaDB TX.

High Availability and Proven Performance with MariaDB

The Claro drive team knew the service’s database would be under constant heavy load, so in comparing DBMS offerings, high availability and rock-solid performance were the top considerations. MariaDB TX and its built-in MaxScale database proxy checked those boxes and more.

Using MaxScale in conjunction with MariaDB Galera Cluster gives América Móvil a synchronous multi-master cluster (with read-write splitting) that keeps all of its server nodes synchronized. With that MariaDB architecture, there’s no slave lag and no chance for lost transactions—resulting in extremely fast automated failover and 99.999% uptime.

Before committing to a database, América Móvil conducted benchmarking tests on several open source DBMSs. MariaDB repeatedly came out on top—and the inclusion of MaxSCale has been thoroughly proven. Claro drive’s MariaDB databases process approximately 6.5 million queries per day and growing. Over the next year, the team is planning to triple its number of MariaDB databases in production.

Agility and Scalability Provide Room to Grow

Claro drive’s rapid growth means América Móvil needs to be agile, bringing new capacity and features to market quickly and efficiently. During the Claro drive project’s initial planning phase, the team considered using a proprietary database or MySQL, but MariaDB TX provided the best mix: an enterprise open source licensing model that included premium features and responsive support in the base price.

Additionally, MariaDB TX and MaxScale’s capabilities accelerate time-consuming app development and DBA processes and make it easy to scale out applications, letting the Claro drive focus on what’s most important—the customer experience.